No Business Like
by Sera Bex London
Summary: Tag for episode 6x12::The Golden Hammer and an early Valentine's gift. Cho's thoughts on Jane's and Lisbon's relationship before, interactions during and after this episode.


_I have never written a tag but the idea caught on while watching the latest episode and just wouldn't let go. All the while grinning that tell-tale Cho smile…_

_—_

Kimball Cho remembered the first day that Patrick Jane came into Teresa Lisbon's life. In typical Jane-style, the blond man had semi-charmed the near impossibly charmed female agent and goaded, thus alienating himself from the ogre-like man in the office. Although Minelli had mandated the team to take the former psychic in and Lisbon conceded half out of following orders the other half out of compassion, Cho would not have predicted how engrained Patrick Jane would become in the team within the 10 years that followed.

At first, Jane would solve cases with the promise that he would have access to the one case that interested him the most. Cho certainly could understand the other man's blinding thirst for revenge if not his showman methods. Cho expected that Jane viewed them as people he would have to tolerate, sometimes even puppets for his own amusement although he did observe the blond man giving their boss a hug the very first day they had met. He initially brushed it off as the automatic grateful response of a still-crazed man struggling to find any compassionate person. That Teresa Lisbon, the incredibly moral tough-on-the-outside but equally warmhearted marshmallow-on-the-inside woman that she was, became his tether. Over time, over the paper animals and candy animals and sometimes real animals, Cho watched as it gradually evolved into much more.

Time after time, people in the CBI office began whispering. In the 30's, Cho could only have described Jane's behaviour as being sweet on their boss. And while he marvelled his boss' unwavering resistance to their consultants' more romantically-flavored efforts, he could see the walls that she erected around herself crumble to a paper sheen.

He remembered when Jane disappeared for 6 months while he faked his break-down and waited it out in Vegas without any contact to the team or anyone else who had been in his life. He remembered how Van Pelt and Rigsby sent questioning glances towards him when Lisbon continued to stomp around the CBI offices the first couple of months, and then later uncertain ones as they all noticed the corners of their boss' mouth turning further and further downwards day-by-day while the sing-song melody in her voice gradually faded.

And he remembered the stoic straight-backed stony glare that she held right after she learned that Jane had strangled Sheriff McAllister to death and the FBI tried to question her over and over again about their involvement and Jane's whereabouts. He remembered how she went directly to acceptance as soon as she heard Jane's last message captured on her voicemail. And he definitely remembered how she only threw one person under the bus regarding Jane's actions and Cho knew it was so she'd be able to look at her reflection in the mirror each day afterwards with that decision. But he well knew why she had been the only one of them that had suffered career-wise so much as a result.

Cho never regretted a decision he made in his life, good or bad. No point. But in this, probably the worst (at least from a career perspective) if only decision he could have made then, he never had to regret.

How would he ever repay her?

How would you ever repay a saint?

For a time, he cursed Jane in his head for walking away. For being the coward that the oft-silent agent had initially thought that the man who oft needed to be the centre of attention was. It was one thing to walk away from the team, who Cho knew was mostly disposable in Jane's mind despite the decade-long time he had shared working along-side them. However it was another entirely for the consultant to walk away from Lisbon who he had always suspected was truly half Jane's moral compass, the other half personal life-line. But then he found out about the letters.

The minute Jane disappeared, the FBI had a carte-blanche pass courtesy of the most lenient warrant Cho had ever known of to bug the team's phones and otherwise trace any and all communications that could lead to Jane's whereabouts. The FBI was really determined to locate him. Even back then, Cho had a hunch that it wasn't solely to incarcerate the one-time conman. And so when the opportunity to join the FBI presented itself, he didn't think twice.

One of the first side-projects that Abbott openly laid out for him was to track down Patrick Jane.

_You will be rewarded_, the older heavy-set agent promised.

Cho acquiesced.

The first letter was discovered by fluke and it was discovered old-school. It looked like it had been sitting on the footstep just outside the front door of Lisbon's new Washington home for a couple of days. It didn't bear any postmark. He didn't even need to take special measures to open it because it was simply unsealed.

He couldn't help it. He read the letter itself before taking a picture of it with his mobile and setting it back delicately on Lisbon's footstep.

In this first one, Jane described the boat he had taken to the idyllic island that he had nicknamed his _Blue Heaven. _He talked about the seashells or more accurately, cowries he passed along his daily morning beach walks. And he ended off by admitting without pomp or hesitation that he did indeed miss her. Every day. By the time he finished reading the signature line from _You Know Who_, Cho was hooked.

Okay the truth was that Jane already had him at _Dear Lisbon_.

Of course he had to share the letter with his new team and with that, his new boss. And of course he had to share every other letter he was able to intercept and copy before returning after that, which was just as unmarked and untraceable. And always just missing the delivery person.

He knew that Senior Agent Abbott thought Patrick Jane was a sap, a _wuss_ as he jeered one time. He knew that the rest of the men on the team snickered as they pored over Jane's words to Lisbon line-by-line. Those times, he felt faintly sick. The only saving grace was his very surprised but surreptitious observation that with each letter she read, Agent Fischer's eyes progressively softened behind her typically steely composure. By the 4th letter, the female agent's eyes practically melted and maybe, just maybe, even looked wistful.

Lord only knew what Lisbon read into Jane's letters but Cho immediately recognized the increasingly bare plea of a man who desperately wanted a certain woman to not only discover his hiding place but also join him in whatever crazy life he had created for himself. Even if the man didn't realize it himself.

But Cho had worked with his no-nonsense former boss long enough to know that even in the back of her conscious mind she understood the plea, it was an impossible ask for her to fulfill. She absolutely needed to be tethered to the real world, a lawful world regardless of how long she had and would continue to put her life on hold waiting for him to return. Remembering those 6 months that she stubbornly held fast against physically dragging him back to Sacramento, he knew what he had to do. Could do finally to repay part of his debt to her.

Cho casually probed and assessed his superiors until he was convinced that they wanted Jane for his detecting gifts much more than they wanted to throw him in jail and lock away the key. And so the Asian agent had every assurance that once caught and back on US soil, the very resourceful and master manipulative man would be able to quickly turn the situation around to his favor.

And with that, Cho doubled his efforts to find the man. He caught a break when the delivery boy, a pimply teenager that the team later traced as thrice-removed from Jane's old carnie in-laws, was discovered dropping the 5th letter off at Lisbon's sheriff's office.

When he saw Jane brought out in handcuffs from that Austin meeting room where he had reunited with Lisbon for the first time in 2 years, sockless and grinning like a Cheshire cat, he secretly cheered at the beginning of a new era.

Fast forward a few more months and here half the team was reunited, working together again. It was a welcome relief for the normally expressionless agent. He was really getting tired of the stilted, sanitized and ridiculously over-political environment. Even though Lisbon was no longer his boss and not once passed any airs towards him as a reminder, he couldn't help maintaining an air of respect for their old relationship and more significantly for her. So despite her very noticeable title and hierarchy change, almost nothing else in terms of the dynamics really had.

This last case, he could only smirk and wonder how seamlessly his former boss and their past and current consultant created an invisible bubble on-cue as she accused him of playing her boss. And even though both were conscious to politely address anyone else around them, every so often Lisbon would slip and forget that anyone else was in the room allowing the bubble to form instantaneously.

During their familiar exchange, all Cho could think about was an unsurveilled supply closet for which he had swiped the master key one day since it held a comfortable couch much like the attic of the old CBI offices did. _I know a great place for you two to just get it over with._

Like their previous workplace, the rumours about them were rampant. Everyone knew of them except for the two people these rumours were about. Okay, maybe just one of them. There was the predictable office pool, only it wasn't the endless _will they or won't they_ question that people were betting on this time around but _when did they_ or the typically crude _who's the real boss_ million-dollar bet.

Cho's new co-workers kept asking him to join the office pool but he always declined politely. His new colleagues assumed that he already knew when they were first involved since he had worked with them for so long. Given the reputation of being an upstanding man, they chalked Cho's declines to him trying to keep the pool fair. In reality, he knew them too well, namely the almost inhuman Bronte- or Austen-esque restraint of the near-decade long practically celibate man and the saint.

When she let out that she had a date with Ardilos, a man they had both known who was flying out to Austin specially on a jet to see her, Cho recognized immediately how unsettled the normally cool and controlling blond man was. Although Jane continued to proclaim loudly about painting Houston red when he and Lisbon left the building together characteristically bantering about tasselled loafers and entitled rich men, Jane returned a half hour afterwards to flop on his new couch. Only he positioned himself in such a way that his watch was practically in front of his face. The Asian agent watched the other man out of the corner of his eye, amused as he worked overtime to get through his stack of paperwork. Throughout the evening, the blond consultant continued to glare at the ticking hands of his watch with half-closed eyes.

Cho kept shaking his head over and over as Jane cheered him on the next day for catching the latest murderess in the park and without missing a beat tell Lisbon that she had great people instincts, then take it back, then take back the take-back, concluding that she had terrible people skills before finishing off with a compliment to her elegant black hat.

Being able to smoothly alternate between insulting and lavishly complimenting a woman was practically Rule #1 on the Pick-up Artist handbook which Cho knew Jane would have committed cover-to-cover to his memory palace that afternoon around 8 years prior that the consultant had taken to laze around with the book.

_For research_, Jane had reasoned to Lisbon when she stomped over to him and blasted him for wasting precious time while that case's shooter was still free. _For fun_, Jane surreptitiously whispered while winking at his colleagues in the bullpen as soon as Lisbon had turned her back to stomp back to her office.

Cho was pretty sure the blond consultant had been reading it for neither of his admitted purposes.

Yep, definitely Pick-up 101 in play.

Cho placed his hands on his hips, his thoughts inexplicably settling on the closet key secreted away permanently in his pocket. He'd save it for a later time. Maybe when he wanted to one-up Jane for a favor someday.

Or maybe instead, he'd save it to complete his pay-back to their saint.

_Fin._

—

I nearly called this one "Cupid". Happy early Valentine's! :)

Please review? With a Cho-sized cherry on top?

And yep, I'll finish _Red Angels Cry_ soon especially to help get over yet another hiatus…


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